The Moor - Laurie R. King [63]
So I lay flat on my back and cried like a child, in recognised grief for Dorothy Ruskin and fresh, raw grief for the dying Baring-Gould, in frustration at the ridiculous mockery of detective work I was forced to carry out and at my inability to anticipate the antics of my four-legged companion, in rage at the horse and at the sudden shock of pain; at everything and nothing, I cried.
Not for long, of course, because I soon could not breathe at all and I thought my head should explode if I did not stop. I gingerly raised myself upright, then got to my feet, and walked over to sit on a nearby boulder that a hundred years ago or so had fallen away from the tor that loomed over my head. I dried my face, blew my nose, rested my head in my hands until the pounding internal pressure had subsided—long enough for a rabbit to lose its fear and venture out of its bury among the clitter. It ducked into hiding when I put my glasses on preparatory to standing and retrieving Red, but when I raised my head I thumped back down onto the boulder, more stunned than I had been by any of the falls.
For I saw: beauty. I saw before me an undulating sweep of green and russet hills crowned by the watchful tors and divided up by the meandering streams and the stone walls. A cloud moved in front of the pale autumnal sun, its dark shadow passing across the hills like a hand in front of a face, leaving the surface clean and refreshed.
Dartmoor lay stretched before me, quiet, ageless, green, brown, and open; not vast, but limitless; not open to conquest, but willing to befriend; calm, contemplative, watchful. It was, I saw in a flash of revelation, very like the Palestinian desert I had known and come to love four years before, a harsh and unfriendly place until one succumbed to its dictates and submitted to the lesser rhythms of life in a dry land.
Dartmoor was a wet desert, its harsh climate the other end of the spectrum from the hot, dry climate of Palestine, but with similar small, tight, ungenerous, and intense results. Fighting the strictures of a desert brought only exhaustion, ignoring its demands risked death, but an open acceptance of the perfection of the life to be lived therein—one might find unexpected riches there. And, perhaps, here.
The fitful sun went away eventually, and the moor stopped speaking to me, but when I got to my feet it was all different.
I was no longer a stranger here.
I climbed up the fat, weathered stones tumbling down from the tor and stood looking down at this miraculously transformed piece of countryside. At last I knew what we were doing here, why the death of an itinerant moor man should matter, why Baring-Gould had found his calling and the spiritual nourishment he required, breathing the air of Dartmoor.
When eventually I returned to Red and to my task I was chagrined to find that the change in my perspective did not have much effect on the frustration I felt in trying to question the moor dwellers, or on my physical state: It still felt like trying to carve blancmange, and I still ached and coughed and sneezed. It certainly had no gentling effect on Red, who managed to dump me off once more before we stopped for the evening.
It did, however, help me begin to understand the people I was dealing with, isolated individuals who were nonetheless bound tightly together by the land on which they dwelt. When I spoke to a woman feeding the chickens in her yard or a family squeezed together for a meal, I was speaking not just with solitary, hard-pressed people, but with members of the community that was Dartmoor.
And not a damn one of them had seen anything that sounded the least bit important.
Holmes and I had agreed to meet back at Lew House on Wednesday night. I could actually have made it back there, but it would have meant